Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

China Miéville is a three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. He is the author of many books, including The City & The City, Embassytown and Perdido Street Station. He is also the author of the short story collection Looking for Jake and Other Stories, and the novellas This Census-Taker and The Last Days of New Paris. He lives and works in London.

You can't talk about Mieville without using the word "brilliant" ... The writing, never less than excellent, takes many tones throughout the 28 stories, some showy, some not. Pastiche, when present, is so skilful that it can go unnoticed. Subjects of real weight are handled with unobtrusive ease but never glibly nor diminished by facetiousness ... Fascinating, full of suggestion and implication, and beautiful. -- Ursula Le Guin Guardian If anyone doubted whether China Mieville had imagination to burn, proof of his indefatigable creative restlessness is to be found in this collection of short stories ... This is a bumper collection overflowing with new visions of our beautiful, terrible world. -- Claire Allfree Metro A volume that suggests Mieville is not merely looking for techniques to take back to his longer-form fiction, but doing something altogether more ambitious: exploring the unsettling possibilities of short fiction to describe our unsettled lives, rather as JG Ballard did in the last century. SFX Award winner Mieville (Embassytown) moves effortlessly among realism, fantasy, and surrealism ... His characters, whether ordinary witnesses to extraordinary events or lunatics operating out of inexplicable compulsions, are invariably well drawn and compelling. Above all, what the stories have in common is a sense that the world is not just strange, but stranger than we can ever really comprehend Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review) Horror, noir, fantasy, politics, and poetry swirl into combinations as satisfying intellectually as they are emotionally. Mieville (Railsea, 2012, etc.) has a habit of building his narratives by taking a metaphor, often about a political or social issue, and asking what would happen if it were literally true ... In less-capable hands, this method might result in mere gags or dead horses endlessly beaten. (Good thing this isn't a Mieville story, or you'd be wiping off bits of rotten horseflesh.) In Mieville's hands it ranges from clever to profound ... Bradbury meets Borges, with Lovecraft gibbering tumultuously just out of hearing Kirkus (Starred Review)